Persona Builder: Web based tool for creating personas - Home
For Motorola scientists, nosiness can be a virtue -- chicagotribune.com
- The earliest type of messaging was sending a simple thumbs up or thumbs down to the other home, using a repurposed TiVo remote. Later, participants could use a keyboard for real-time chatting or invite friends to watch a show
Patterns in behavior
Metcalf's team is still combing through the latest testing data but observed some general behavior patterns. Elaine Huang, senior staff researcher, said "conversations are pushing out beyond TV," with one group of users proposing a pizza outing over chat. Joe Tullio, senior research scientist, saw that male viewers were chatting more with their friends' significant others.- The researchers print important quotes or observations on notecards, which are then tacked on the walls of a conference room in the Galvin Center at Motorola's Schaumburg campus. Noel Massey, principal staff research engineer, came up with the idea of printing bar codes on the cards so they could be easily scanned into a computer database.
Three Important Benefits of Personas
- Psychologists call this 'grounding'—the natural behavior of initially finding a known reference point in a foreign information space.
- While grounding helps people adjust to complex situations, it can be detrimental when it happens during the design process. If, while conjuring up an interface, designers ground themselves in the design, they run the serious risk of creating an interface that only they can use.
- Any tools that help designers prevent the natural behavior of grounding helps them attack the design more objectively, with their target user in mind.
- Benefit #1: Preventing Grounding with Personas
- Personas are model users that the team creates to help understand the goals, motivations, and behaviors of the people who will use the interface. The persona represents behavior patterns, helping the designer understand the flow of the user's day and how the interface will fit into it.
- Benefit #2: The Oral Tradition Lives On
- The team members had made up lives for these people, usually based on the actual observations they made when they studied real users. They constantly used these imaginary lives to relate important stories about how these users would interact with the proposed designs.
- Using just the oral tradition, the stories become distorted with every new telling. Many of the teams prevented this distortion by capturing the stories along with the persona descriptions.
- Benefit #3: The Role Personas Play in Role Playing
- From an early age, we use role playing as a way to safely explore the world around us. By pretending to be different people, we can try things out from their perspective, seeing if their viewpoint is different from our own
- When we adopt a role, we can start to view the world around us from that person's perspective. Using the persona as the target role, we can identify how that person will interact with the design and the issues that will arise.
- To get the benefits, the personas have to have rich, relevant detail. They need to accurately represent the users the team is aiming for.
- The benefits of preventing grounding, encouraging story telling, and enhancing role playing are rarely discussed, yet very present when you see the method in full force. It's these benefits that guide our belief that personas will be a trusted method for many years to come.
Personas vs. User Descriptions; Apples vs. Tomatoes » UIE Brain Sparks
- In my mind, Christopher is clearly confusing Personas with User Descriptions. User descriptions are what-we-think-we-know-now writeups of who uses our design and why. Personas, on the other hand, are carefully researched and crafted personalities we create to focus the design energy.
- User descriptions help us see where our thinking is, help new team members come up to speed, and help us identify where we may have made assumptions that could turn out false. Personas helps us get past the this-design-is-for-every-breathing-being problem and help us focus our attention on the needs of three to seven specific individuals.
- So, I recommend we call things by their names and not try and bunch different types of design activities and deliverables under one name. (And don’t even get me started with the folks who often refer to usability tests as focus groups.
Don Norman's jnd.org / Ad-Hoc Personas & Empathetic Focus
- Empathetic focus. By focus I mean that the design must be clean and coherent. It is not a collection of features added willy-nilly through the life-span of the product, even if each feature by itself makes sense. Rather it is having a clear image of what the product is meant to be -- and what it is not meant to be -- and rejecting features that do not fit, only accepting ones that do. By empathy, I mean an understanding of and identification with the user population, the better to ensure that they will be able to take advantage of the product, to use it readily and easily -- not with frustration but with pleasure.
- We quickly invented one relevant Persona per case: a hard-working, single mother (case one), a serious full-time student with no outside experience or responsibilities (case two), and a lackadaisical, laid-back goof-off (for three). Unlike traditional Persona studies, these were all made-up, but each was described in sufficient detail (including names), so that the group all agreed they felt like people they knew
- I have found that an excellent way to use a Persona is to have someone role-play the part.
Personas and Goal-Directed Design: An Interview with Kim Goodwin
- emphasizes identifying goals of users
before doing any formal design. - "Who's really using
this, and what do they really want to accomplish? - they are powerful design, measurement, and communication
tools. - the technology industry is doing things
backwards - If you start with a deeply
flawed design, usability testing will diagnose many of the problems, but won't
necessarily point to a cure. Iteration won't get you to a great design - That moment of conceptualization is an intuitive leap
I don't think any methodology can replace. The Goal-Directed methodology reduces
the size of the leap and provides tools for evaluating the quality of the result--in
that sense, I think it's probably better for inexperienced designers than some
other methods. - Because any application designed for
the web can be distributed almost for free, companies take that as permission
to launch products or services in "web time," without really thinking
through the business plan, the design, or a whole host of other crucial factors.
2008/08/04
haveuheard's favorite 08/04/2008
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